The document we recently created, describes in details the extension design principles, its conceptual map, the objects of the real world reflected in it and how do we model them, and explains several exemplary use cases.

Again, some time has passed since we were promoted to pending.webschemas.org but now we are very close to the promotion to the official “pending” status (i.e. to pending.schema.org). The nature of extensions in pending is such that they already can be used for PRODUCTION sites, as they share the namespace with the main schema.org.

In practical terms, we will very soon be able to use all the terms we proposed, both for core and for fibo.schema.org, since the publication initially planned for May 15th (schema.org v3.2).

I’m pleased to inform you that our proposal for the financial extension to schema.org based on FIBO, was accepted as a part of “pending” extensions: http://pending.webschemas.org/

In essence it means that our “hosted” extension proposal is just one step from being in full production mode of schema.org. The time that lapsed since we launched our “Pull Request” was admittedly, quite long and it was mostly related to the large scale changes and improvements on schema.org side. Despite the long waiting, we are happy that our extension comes into much better system for global web vocabulary.

We are very pleased to confirm that our work on schema.org financial extension based on FIBO has been fully appreciated by schema.org steering committee and we are now officially in the “core” of schema.org. (see schema.org release notes)

This is huge success and we would like to discuss within the community how we could all benefit from the achievement. We do not stop going at fast pace, though. As we speak, we are lunching another proposal for fibo.schema.org “hosted” schema.org extension (the post about that step will come here this week).

Last, but not least – we will soon propose our first community wide Conference Call.

On the list of things for consideration is our “Financial (FIBO) proposals for the core vocabulary” for schema.org containing the basic types and properties related to financial products. This was officially proposed as Pull Request (#965) in the schemaorg repository.

I invite you to review this proposal an submit, hopefully supportive, comments against the Pull Request. The more support this proposal gets, the more likely it is to be accepted, laying the foundation for future more detailed FIBO extension proposals.

An explanation of why you are supportive, and why it will improve the markup of financial resources, would be good. However a simple +1 would also be helpful.

I thought I would update the group as to where we are at in the process of proposing ways for the Schema.org vocabulary to increase its capabilities for marking up financial organisations, their products and services for structured data discovery on the web.

Mirek described in the Invitation to Participation, this work started as an initiative of the EDMC who engaged an international team to help build the basis of a proposal for a hosted fibo.schema.org extension to the vocabulary.

That work, inspired by FIBO, identified several potential Types and properties that would probably add value to the broad core of Schema.org and lay the foundation for a more detailed, financial industry focused, fibo extension to follow.

A ‘proposal for the core’ is what we are concentrating on at the moment with the proposals and examples that have been shared on the wiki, and loaded into a test version of the Schema.org site at sdo-fibo.appspot.com.

How to view the Proposals. If you are viewing them as a financial industry expert, you may well find these generic terms as being light on industry specific detail. This is a deliberate approach to make these general terms understandable and applicable across a broad spectrum of use cases that spreads wider than specific financial organisations. For example a furniture store describing 6 months interest-free credit on all chairs purchased in December. This whilst laying the foundation and basic capability for a bank to describe the products and services it has to offer.

Enhancements to Service. As part of this proposal we are recommending that several properties applicable to Product have Service added to their domain. These properties are: aggregateRating, audience, brand, isRelatedTo, isSimilarTo, logo, and review. Whilst adding value to our, financial oriented, proposal also echoes previous discussions generally in the Schema.org communities to align Product and Service properties more closely.

Like any Schema.org proposal it is open for discussion until it is part of a ship. I invite comments and or questions from anyone that is interested. The intension is to fairly quickly propose this to the main Schema.org group, via a pull request to the schemaorg Github repository and opening up the discussion to the wider community.

New to Schema.org? If you are new to Schema.org and its concepts, you might find this background article, from those at the heart of it, useful reading. Also if you would like an insight into the process this is all part of – applying markup, using the Schema.org site, and creating extensions – I can recommend a webinar series I recently recorded, Schema.org in TwoParts, especially part 2.

We are happy to present to you the results of the work done by EDMC fibo.schema.org team. The result of our work is the proposal for a minimal set of types and properties describing basic financial products to be included into schema.org’s “core” vocabulary. We are delivering a set of basic terms that shall enable webmasters to describe the most important financial products on their websites, and in other forms of digital communication.

Immediately after this proposal, we will propose a hosted extension (fibo.schema.org) that will contain much more types and properties that satisfy the needs of more advanced users.